Exclusionary Environments of the Emerging Energy and Political Transitions (EXEMPT) is a European Commission funded project under the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme (Grant# 101152840). The project is supervised by Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos from the Johns Hopkins University – University Pompeu Fabra Public Policy Center (Barcelona, Spain).

In simplest terms, EXEMPT asks: Whom, how and why environmentalists leave out? Underlying exclusions are apparent in various ideological strands of environmentalism and emerging environmental policies today.

To develop a complex and multi-dimensional understanding of the processes that sustain exclusion in environmental discourse and policy, I specifically explore exclusionary environmentalism in the context of Serbia and Montenegro, two countries on the European semi-periphery. In these contexts, environmentalism is rarely framed around climate change. Instead, it centers on local struggles to protect land, water, and other natural resources from extractive industries such as mining, hydropower, and large infrastructure projects—developments often justified as part of the EU’s critical minerals strategy and broader green transition goals.

EXEMPT investigates how various imaginaries and ideologies contribute to exclusion, and how such exclusion unfolds in the everyday practices of environmental activists. In doing so, EXEMPT includes a wide range of methods: digital ethnography of activist spaces, qualitative interviews with activists, experts, and politicians, surveys of both activists and the wider population, as well as neuroscience techniques such as eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, and GSR devices to examine implicit and explicit reasoning.

Key outputs

  • An empirical paper in Journal of Political Ideologies (with Vuk Čađenović, Damar Institute) exploring how environmental activists in Serbia occasionally endorse far-right talking points
  • Podcast Interview with the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy
  • Interview with Ecoportal (in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Montenegrin)